Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Kingdom of God Has No Borders
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1962
WEBSITE: http://melanimcalister.com/
CITY: Washington
STATE: DC
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 00107025
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n00107025
HEADING: McAlister, Melani, 1962-
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PERSONAL
Born 1962.
EDUCATION:University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, B.A.; Brown, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. George Washington University, teacher of American studies and international affairs. Worked formerly as a political organizer for a Boston-based peace group; as a fellow at Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies; a faculty fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication; and a fellow at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous journals, including Journal of American History, American Literary History, American Quarterly, and South Atlantic Quarterly; and periodicals, including Washington Post, New York Times, and Nation.
SIDELIGHTS
Melani McAlister is a writer and professor of American Studies and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Raised in North Carolina, McAlister attended college at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar. While studying international studies, she became involved in a variety of activist movements, including anti-apartheid work. Following graduation, she moved to Boston to work as an organizer for a peace group.
McAlister received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown, where she studied the role of culture in shaping views of the larger world. The focus of her research includes nationalism and transnationalism; cultural theory; religion and culture; the rhetoric of foreign policy; and cultural and media history. In The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, McAlister traces the history of the American Protestant evangelical internationalist movement of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1950s, the book covers events up until the independence of South Sudan in 2005.
The first two sections of the book focus on the work of groups and gatherings rather than that of individuals, which come later in the book. The first section begins in the 1950s and covers up until the Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization in 1974. In chapter one, McAlister examines the rise in evangelicals’ world-missions in the post-war period. She contrasts this focus on international conversion with the events occurring elsewhere in the world, most significantly the civil rights movement in the U.S. and Cold War strategizing abroad. Chapter two investigates the rise of what has been referred to as ‘martyrdom’ in evangelical internationalism. She writes about the Auca martyrs in Ecuador and the missionaries in the Congo, some of whom died while they were doing missionary work or were forced to leave. In Chapter three, McAlister discusses the evangelical social activism that arose out of the Intervarsity triennial conferences at Urbana in the 1960s. This movement was a response to the underlying racial tensions that permeated missionary work, as evidenced by new converts from Africa being barred from white colleges and churches in the American South, and the pushback against Congolese Christians in their attempts to assert spiritual and political independence from white missionaries. Chapter four covers victory of Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 and chapter five examines the Battle of Lausanne in 1974.
The second section examines the ways in which evangelists perceived themselves as both victims and saviors. Chapter six and seven describe evangelical responses to Eastern European Communism and the evils of the South African apartheid. The remaining chapters in the section describe the ways in which evangelical sentiment, both at home and abroad, began to develop the concept of spiritual warfare, most notably in the rising antagonism toward Islam. The third section of the book highlights the main events and trends of the twenty-first century. McAlister describes ‘spiritual tourism,’ or short-term missions, the Iraq War, and the independence of South Sudan in the first three chapters of this section. She also dives into the sexual politics that developed out of the HIV outbreaks in Africa. The book concludes with an Epilogue in which McAlister examines the peculiar phenomenon of the Trump White House. With 81 percent of white American evangelicals voting for a man whose moral compass seems to differ so drastically from their own, it begs the question of what the future of evangelical morality will look like.
James Bratt on the In All Things website described the book as “a wide-ranging, closely researched account of just how American evangelicals have been involved overseas.” Matt Bowman in Desert News Online wrote that the book “paints a compelling and rich portrait of American evangelicals, one which should help all Americans think in more complicated ways about both American Christians.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of The Kingdom of God Has No Borders.
ONLINE
Deseret News Online, https://www.deseretnews.com/ (September 11, 2018), review of The Kingdom of God Has No Borders.
In All Things, https://inallthings.org/ (August 1, 2018), review of The Kingdom of God Has No Borders.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (July 2, 2018), review of The Kingdom of God Has No Borders.
Melani McAlister teaches American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945.
MELANI MCALISTER
The Kingdom of God Has No Borders
A Global History of American Evangelicals
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2018
August 24, 2018 Zeb Larson
Melani McAlister’s The Kingdom of God Has No Borders (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a global history of evangelicals since 1945 and focuses on the complexities and contradictions that encompass the modern evangelical movement in the U.S. as it looks at the rest of the world. McAlister begins by examining the impact of the civil rights movement in the United States and the decolonization of much of the Global South to show how evangelical Christians tried to respond to a changing world. In discussions of international events ranging from evangelical perceptions of the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa to contemporary views of the Islamic world, McAlister deconstructs the paradigms that inform evangelical opinions: concerns with persecution of fellow Christians, proselytization, and an eagerness to work with and around members of the Global South.
The book turns much of the conventional wisdom about evangelicals in the United States on its head. While the popular stereotype of evangelical Christians as politically conservative and simultaneously politically apathetic persists despite its numerous inconsistencies, this book instead examines the disparate voices and conversations taking place within the evangelical community, many of them coming from more liberal voices. Rather than a uniformly conservative political bloc, what emerges is a community that is strikingly fragmentary and debating the best ways to ensure their faith remains relevant in a shifting world.
Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.
The Author’s Corner With Melani McAlister
AUGUST 16, 2018 / JOHNFEA
McAlisterMelani McAlister is Professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University. This interview is based on her new book The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (Oxford University Press, 2018).
JF: What led you to write The Kingdom of God Has No Borders?
MM: I was raised a Southern Baptist in North Carolina, and so the assumption many people make is that I wrote about evangelicals to understand my own past. But, in all honesty, I had no interest in writing about that, and I still don’t experience this book as being about my own history in any significant way – other than the fact that I get some of the jokes evangelicals make about Bible drills or summer camp.
Instead, I got interested in writing this book because I wanted to show the complexity of a history that I thought had been told as too entirely domestic, and too relentlessly white. I also realized that the international politics among evangelicals was more complex and interesting than I had acknowledged in my first book. That book, Epic Encounters, was a study of American images of the Middle East, focusing on popular culture and media. One chapter was on US views of Israel, and it included a discussion of the “prophecy talk” of white evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s, which was something I did know about from personal experience. When Epic Encounters came out in 2001, white evangelicals were in the news – with Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell both making aggressive comments about Islam in the wake of 9/11. So, at that point, I thought I would write a quick book about prophecy and politics among evangelicals after the Cold War. When I started that research, however, I realized that many more interesting things were going on in terms of evangelical engagement with international affairs – so much so that the discussion of prophecy became very minor—it was ultimately relegated to just a few pages inThe Kingdom of God.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of The Kingdom of God Has No Borders?
MM: The fundamental premise of the book is that, when international issues are taken into account, the history of modern evangelicalism looks different from the dominant stories we have about it. This book aims to both expand and challenge key components of the domestic story by showing how some theologically conservative Protestants in the United States came to understand themselves to be part of a truly global community, and to trace the impact of those transnational ties on thinking about race, gender, and the role of the US in the world.
JF: Why do we need to read The Kingdom of God Has No Borders?
MM: In the book, I tell a complex history of US evangelicals as part of a global community. Starting with controversies over racism and missionary work in the aftermath of WWII—including the role of missionaries in the Congo crisis of the early 1960s—and closing with debates over homosexual rights in Uganda in the 2000s, I show that evangelicals in the last seventy years were consistently engaged in politics, both domestic and international. I also highlight the fact that evangelicals have consistently disagreed about what their faith required of them politically and morally.
The focus of the book is on white and black theologically conservative Protestants in the US, but the story includes the Latin American leaders of the “social concern” faction at the Lausanne Congress in 1974, South African evangelical anti-apartheid activists (black and white), Arab Christians who challenge US policy in Iraq, and the theologically conservative Protestants in Uganda who supported the anti-homosexuality law in the 2000s. Global South evangelicals did not have one political view, and this is not a celebration of either their liberal views or their conservative impact. Instead, the book is an argument that American evangelicals were changed by their transnational encounters, becoming more liberal on race, sometimes more conservative on gender, and often more aware of themselves as just one part of a larger international network of believers. As Americans, they had wealth and power, but the story of the last few decades is a story of the rise of global South evangelicals into positions of cultural and moral authority.
So: read the book to learn a more complex story about evangelical history, to understand more about the debates that have shaped the community, and to see how one important subset of Americans came to understand their own role, and their country’s role, on the international stage.
JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian? (Of if you are not an American history, how did you get interested in the study of the past?)
MM: I was always interested in US foreign policy. Back in the 1980s, I majored in international studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and I was involved in an array of causes, including anti-apartheid work. Before I went to graduate school, I worked for several years as a staffer for a peace group in Boston. It was in the role of activist that I actually became interested in culture. After trying to go out and convince people of our views on policy issues, I came to see that none of us come to our political opinions with pure rationality–on foreign policy or much of anything else. Our values matter, and our values are often shaped by forces we aren’t fully aware of or don’t recognize, including popular culture. So I went to graduate school in American Studies at Brown, and I studied the role of culture—including religious cultures—in shaping our views of the larger world.
JF: What is your next project?
MM: I am beginning work on a study of the popular culture of humanitarianism, focusing on the “long 1970s” (the late 1960s to the early 1980s). Tentatively titled “We Were the World,” the book will begin with the global response to the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-1970—where images of starving babies with distended bellies became the icon of a kind of activist humanitarian agenda on behalf of the Biafrans. It will end with the early 1980s concerts for Ethiopia. The basic argument of the book is that humanitarianism, like so many things, is a double-edged sword. Sometimes Americans became involved in humanitarian causes in problematic ways that were condescending and racialized; and yet sometimes they connected with those who were suffering in ways that reached toward genuine solidarity. Culture played a role in shaping our understandings, and thus our politics.
JF: Thanks, Melani!
Melani McAlister
Title:
Professor of American Studies and International Affairs
Office:
Suite 501I
Address: Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E St. NW
Phone: 202-994-8765
Email:
mmc@gwu.edu
Website:
http://melanimcalister.com/
Areas of Expertise
US in a global context/transnational US history; US media and cultural history; evangelical Christianity; religion and politics
Melani McAlister specializes in the multiple “global visions” produced by and for Americans. In her writing and teaching, she focuses on the ways in which cultural and political history intersect, and on the role of religion and culture in shaping US “interests” in other parts of the world. Her own interests include nationalism and transnationalism; cultural theory; religion and culture; the rhetoric of foreign policy; and cultural and media history (including television, film, print, and digital).
Professor McAlister is the author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (rev. ed. 2005, orig. 2001), and the co-editor, with R. Marie Griffith, of Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States (2008). She has recently completed The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018), a study of US Christian evangelicals, popular culture, and international affairs. The book examines the ways in which US evangelicals understood their own international interests, focusing in particular on the Middle East and Africa. McAlister explores US evangelical investments, from their fears of decolonization in the 1960s to activism on international religious freedom in the 1990s to responses to the Iraq war after 2003.
McAlister has published in a broad range of academic journals, including the Journal of American History, American Literary History, American Quarterly, and South Atlantic Quarterly. She has also written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Nation, and has spoken to a broad range of media outlets about US-Middle East relations and US evangelical life and culture, including PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Irish Radio One, and national television stations in Germany, Austria, and Iran.
Professor McAlister received her PhD in American Civilization from Brown University and her BA in International Affairs from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has been a Fellow at and Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies, a Faculty Fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, and a Fellow at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion. She has served on the International Advisory Board of the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut, and as member of the editorial boards of American Quarterly, the Journal of American History, and Diplomatic History. She has lectured at dozens of universities, both nationally and internationally. She has also served as a consultant and lecturer for American Studies programs and institutes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Palestine.
Current Research
McAlister has begun working on a book that examines the global response to the Biafra crisis – the events surrounding the civil war in Nigeria from 1967-71. The study is tentatively titled, “’Keep Biafra Alive!’: Religion, Global Media, and Popular Humanitarianism during Nigeria’s Civil War." The book will explore the involvement of both religious and secular NGOs in the US and Europe in crafting a humanitarian response to the war and particularly to the images of starving children that circulated globally. The study examines the international affairs projects of ordinary people, exploring how the humanitarian politics surrounding Biafra emerged in a global context, including the social movements that responded to the Vietnam War and apartheid. The book explores the history of international relations, broadly conceived, by combining media studies, visual culture analysis, social movement history, religious studies, and political history.
She is also co-organizing, with two other GW faculty members, a major international conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the start of the Biafra war. It is scheduled for April 2017.
Overall, McAlister's interests center around US cultural and political encounters with global issues, focused primarily on the Middle East and Africa. She teaches graduate courses on the US in the World, US media and popular culture, the cultures of transnational encounter, and religion and media, among others.
Education
PhD, Brown U., 1996
BA, UNC-Chapel Hill, 1984
Publications
Books:
Forthcoming 2020: Cambridge History of America and the World, Volume 4. Co-edited with David Engerman and Max Friedman.
The Kingdom of God has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States. Co-edited with R. Marie Griffith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008. Originally a special issue of American Quarterly, 2007.
Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, o. 2001. Revised and expanded edition, 2005.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters:
“The Triumph and Downfall of ‘Social Concern’ in Global Evangelical Life, 1965-1985.” Journal of American Studies, part of a special issue (Fall 2017).
“The Triumph and Downfall of ‘Social Concern’ in Global Evangelical Life, 1965-1985.” Journal of American Studies, part of a forthcoming special issue (winter 2017) coordinated by the International Working Group on Global Evangelicalism.
“The Body in Crisis: Congo and the Transformations of Evangelical Internationalism, 1960–65.” Forthcoming in Outside In: Transnational and International Dimensions of Modern American History, Ed. Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017.
“Queering Diplomatic History: A Colloquium,” Diplomatic History (winter 2016): 1-62. Co-authored with six other contributors.
“US Evangelicals and the Politics of Slave Redemption as Religious Freedom,” South Atlantic Quarterly, special issue on Religious Freedom, ed. Saba Mahmood and Peter Danchin, forthcoming Oct. 2013.
“The Persecuted Body: Evangelical Internationalism, Islam, and the Politics of Fear.” In Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective. Ed. Michael Laffan and Max Weiss. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Oct. 2012.
"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: American Missionaries, The Problem of Racism, and Decolonization in the Congo,” OAH Magazine of History, 26 (Sumer 2012), 33-37
“A Virtual Muslim is Something to Be.” American Quarterly (June 2010): 221-231.
“What Would Jesus Do? Evangelicals, the Iraq War, and the Struggle for Position.” In America and Iraq: Policy-making, Intervention and Regional Politics. Ed. David Ryan and Patrick Kiely. New York: Routledge, 2009.
“What is Your Heart For? Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere.” American Literary History (December 2008): 870-95.
“Is the Public Sphere Still Naked?” with Marie Griffith. American Quarterly (Sept. 2008): 527-563.
“Rethinking the ‘Clash of Civilizations’: American Evangelicals, the Bush Administration, and the Winding Road to the Iraq War.” In Race, Nation, and Empire in U.S. History. Ed. Matthew Guterl and James Campbell. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007.
“American Feminists, Global Visions, and the Problem of Female Genital Surgeries.” In Americanism: New Perspectives on The History of an Ideal. Ed. Michael Kazin and Joe McCartin. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006.
“Prophecy, Politics, and The Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Fundamentalism’s New World Order.” South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 2003): 773-798.
Reprinted in Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of and Popular Culture. Eds. Rebecca Stein, and Ted Swendenburg. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2005.
Revised version: “Left Behind and the Politics of Prophecy Talk.” In Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism. Eds. Ashley Dawon and Malini J. Schueller. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2007.
“A Cultural History of the War Without End,” special issue Journal of American History (Sept. 2002): 439-456. This issue published as a book: September 11 and History. Ed. Joanne Meyerowitz. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2003.
Reprinted in Hollywood and War: A Film Reader. Ed. David Slocum. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Reprinted in U.S.-Middle East Historical Encounters: A Critical Survey. Ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
"One Black Allah: The Middle East in African American Cultural Politics, 1955-1967," American Quarterly (September 1999), 622-655.
Reprinted in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Ed. Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004.
Revised version in Faith in the Market: Religion, Urban Identities, and Consumer Culture. Ed John Giggie and Diane Winston. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2002.
"'The Common Heritage of Mankind': Negotiating Race, Nation, and Masculinity in the King Tut Exhibit." Representations 54 (Spring 1996), 80-103.
General Interest publications:
“Seeking Stranger Things,” part of the series “Is this All there Is?” Immanent Frame blog, Social Science Research Council, https://tif.ssrc.org/2017/10/18/seeking-stranger-things/.
“Maryland Bills Would Stifle Academic Freedom,” Baltimore Sun, February 12, 2014.
“Roundtable: Engaging Religion at the Department of State.” The Immanent Frame, blog of the Social Science Research Council, July 2013.
“Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: American Missionaries, The Problem of Racism, and Decolonization in the Congo.” OAH Magazine of History, 26 (Sumer 2012), 33-37.
Invited Contributor to “Frequencies, Genealogies of Spirituality.” Sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. Entry on B.K.S. Iyengar. Oct. 13, 2011.
Republished in “On Being,” blog of the public radio show hosted by Krista Tippett. April 2015.
“The Persecuted Body: American Evangelicals, Islam and Religious Suffering.” Middle East Report. December 2008.
Libertas Blog. Review of Brian De Palma’s Redacted. December 2007.
“An Empire of Their Own.” The Nation. September 22, 2003.
Reprinted in Good Weekend Magazine, supplement to Australia’s two largest newspapers.
“Saving Private Lynch.” New York Times op-ed page. April 6, 2003.
"Armageddon on the Bestseller List." Washington Post, Outlook section. February 2, 2003.
“Television, Terrorism, and the Making of Incomprehension.” The Chronicle of Higher Education Review. December 7, 2001.
Classes Taught
Graduate:
AMST 6210: US in a Global Context
AMST 6190: Religion and Media
AMST 6190: US Media and Popular Culture
Undergraduate:
AMST 2320: US Media and Cultural History
AMST 2490: US-Middle East Cultural Encounters
AMST 2710: US in a Global Context
AMST 3900: Critiquing Culture
Professor David R. Swartz Interviews Professor Melani McAlister on Her New Book ‘The Kingdom of God Has No Borders’ and Looking Outside America for Fresh Insight on American Evangelicals
September 11, 2018
Since the 1980s, when the Religious Right helped elevate California governor Ronald Reagan to the presidency, outside observers have typically understood American evangelicalism through the lens of American politics. Melani McAlister, a professor of American studies at George Washington University, wants to tell a broader story by looking outside American borders. Studying American evangelical missionary and humanitarian activity in Egypt, South Africa, Congo, and South Sudan, she says, reveals a movement that has always seen itself as part of a global communion.
In her book, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, McAlister applies this international lens to the past half-century of American evangelical history. David R. Swartz, associate professor of history at Asbury University and author of Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, spoke with McAlister about her research.
What does applying a global lens tell us about American evangelicalism?
It tells us that evangelicalism is politically complicated and racially diverse. Global engagement sometimes pushes American evangelicals in conservative directions and sometimes in liberal directions, but it definitely makes the political ground they occupy much more complex than we often acknowledge.
How have encounters in the Majority World made American evangelicals more liberal in some ways and more conservative in others?
American evangelicals have often given donations to charity. That’s not new. But as they encountered economic insecurity, political instability, health crises, and refugee situations, they began to realize that global poverty couldn’t be solved through charity alone. In 2005 American and European evangelicals prayed outside the G8 Summit for debt relief for Africa. They were saying, “This is a political issue that needs a political solution.” This was because they had been talking to and reading the work of people in Africa saying similar things.
On the other hand, African leaders have tended to be more conservative on issues like ordaining women or officiating at lesbian and gay weddings, and American evangelicals have treated their voices as the authentic ones. They say, “We hold this conservative position, and we’re in alliance with our African brothers.” This has put mainline Protestants in a real bind because they end up being portrayed as neo-colonialists, excessively white, and not in solidarity with people of color.
If telling a transnational story matters in understanding American evangelicals, does it also reframe the narratives we tell about the global evangelical community?
It takes us beyond the story that it’s primarily American evangelicals who have gone abroad and influenced people in the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America with their values, politics, and ideology. It’s undeniable that people in the Global South are active agents in framing their own politics, religion, and the global community more broadly. The leadership of the Lausanne Movement or the World Evangelical Alliance is coming more frequently from the Global South. And there’s a broader sense that this global evangelical community has to listen to those voices. Missionaries are coming from Nigeria to the United States. They are not people who are simply drawing on values they’ve been taught by Americans. African, Asian, and Latin American evangelicals are constructing a global community.
What do you mean when you describe Americans as “enchanted” by Africa?
I’m describing feelings of emotional connection, investment, and even solidarity with Africa that are cultivated by short-term missions or requests for donations from international charities. We see among American evangelicals—and other Americans too—a fear that our modern industrialized society has taken something away from us, made our lives too materialistic, too rationalist, too evacuated of meaning. People often present Africa as a kind of antidote, as a space where Christians are more authentic or emotionally rich, where Christianity is more saturated by the spiritual.
I saw this a lot in Sudan, where I did a short-term mission with a church, and in Cairo with InterVarsity students working with Sudanese refugees. In both cases, Americans saw the Sudanese as being close to Jesus in a way that they were not. But there’s a really fine line between respecting and valuing people across cultures and demanding that people embody something that you want yourself. This is not just an evangelical problem. We see this, for instance, in the persistent idea of the noble savage, where genuine admiration also has a kind of imperialist demand that people be pure and simple, so that you as a Westerner can visit them to find yourself renewed by them in some way. Enchantment includes the potential for respect and connection but also the real problem of demanding things in other people.
Before 9/11, but especially after 9/11, when American evangelicals thought of anti-Christian persecution, Muslims were seen as the main perpetrators. How have evangelical views of Muslims changed over the course of the historical period you cover?
Before 1989, evangelicals, like Americans more broadly, were paying more attention to Communist persecution than to persecution by Muslims. They saw Muslims as people who could be converted more than people engaged in persecution.
But in the late 1980s there was a pivot, which intensified dramatically after 9/11, to focusing on Muslims more than Communists as persecutors. On one hand, it’s important to focus on persecution because people do suffer for their religion, and not just Christians. On the other hand, the focus on persecution contributes to misunderstanding. If you have a lens of persecution or Christian-Muslim conflict, you might look at a place like Nigeria, where there is violence between predominantly Christian and predominantly Muslim communities, and see a purely religious conflict rather than a multi-faceted conflict with economic, ethnic, or tribal dimensions. It leads people to see the world in a more simplistic way.
ABOUT ME
I am Professor of American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University. My research focuses on the multiple “global visions” produced by and for Americans. In my writing and teaching, I focus on the ways in which cultural and political history intersect, and on the role of religion and culture in shaping US “interests” in other parts of the world. My own interests include nationalism and transnationalism; cultural theory; religion and culture; the rhetoric of foreign policy; and cultural and media history (including television, film, print, and digital). I am also an avid fan of science fiction, both literature and film, and am determined that one day I will write about China Miéville.
I recently completed The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals, which explores how US evangelical Christians, white and black, have constructed their understandings of — and relationships with — people in the Middle East and Africa. The book explores US evangelical investments, from their fears of decolonization in the 1960s to activism on international religious freedom in the 1990s to responses to the Iraq war after 2003. The book starts with US missionary responses to the decolonization of Congo in 1960 and ends with the debates over the Anti-Homosexuality Law in Uganda in 2014. It is forthcoming August 1, 2018. Some of the images from the book are here.
My first book was Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945. The book originally appeared in 2001, and it was received in the context of the September 11 attacks and the ensuing wars in the Middle East. I published a revised edition, with a new chapter, in 2005.
I am the co-editor of a book with R. Marie Griffith (Washington Univ. of St. Louis), Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States. And I am co-editing volume 4 of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the America and the World, along with Max Friedman and David Engerman. The general editor of this exciting (and massive) project is Mark Bradley.
I received an NEH Fellowship for my next book, on the global responses to the Nigeria-Biafra war of the late 1960s. See “Current Projects.”
I am a native North Carolinian and a proud graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, where I attended as a Morehead Scholar, and where I tried to develop my own major in something that now exists at UNC, Global Studies. After working as a political organizer for several years, I returned to school and earned my PhD from Brown University’s American Studies program. I joined the faculty of George Washington University’s American Studies program in 1996 and live just outside Washington, DC with my life partner, Carl Conetta.
If you are thinking of applying to a PhD program in the humanities, I have some commentary and advice here.
You can follow me on Twitter: @MelaniMcA
McAlister, Melani: THE KINGDOM OF
GOD HAS NO BORDERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
McAlister, Melani THE KINGDOM OF GOD HAS NO BORDERS Oxford Univ. (Adult Nonfiction)
$29.95 8, 1 ISBN: 978-0-19-021342-8
An account of half a century of American evangelicalism abroad.
"In the 1990s," writes McAlister (American Studies and International Affairs/George Washington Univ.;
Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945, 2005), "the map of the
'10/40 Window' was one of the most widely recognized images in the evangelical community. The map had
various incarnations, but all of them illustrated the same basic concept: there was a region of the world that
stretched from Africa to Asia, from 10 degrees to 40 degrees north of the equator--a belt that included India,
Pakistan, China, and the Middle East--that desperately needed Jesus." This is a meticulously researched
survey full of fascinating historical information--perhaps no piece more relevant to this era than the "10/40
Window"--but its academic style will impede many readers. The author tends to begin chapters with
compelling anecdotes and wrap them up with crisp summations ("young evangelicals wanted to go where
God sent them, but they expected God to choose some place extraordinary"). Unfortunately, the bulk of
what falls between is often bogged down in contextual details that, while thoroughly researched, hamper the
flow of the narrative. One notable exception can be found in the chapter detailing a mission trip to Sudan
undertaken by members of Elmbrook Church of Brookfield, Wisconsin. This chapter is reported and not
merely researched, making for a much livelier feel. McAlister joined the mission, and she uses her firsthand
experience to ground her scholarly work. Her impressions--e.g., "I thought it unlikely that we would be
painting a church or building a useless wall"--give readers not only a welcome sense of the author as a
person, but also an account of how she develops her expertise.
A book for libraries; better to be consulted for research than read for general interest.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"McAlister, Melani: THE KINGDOM OF GOD HAS NO BORDERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723152/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=238e14a5. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723152
Book review: American evangelicals are hard to classify, 'The Kingdom of God Has No Borders' claims
By
Matt Bowman
Published: September 11, 2018 6:00 pm
1 Comment
Oxford University Press
Professor of American studies and international affairs Melani McAlister's new book is "The Kingdom of God Has No Borders."
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"THE KINGDOM OF GOD HAS NO BORDERS: A Global History of American Evangelicals," by Melani McAlister, Oxford University Press, 408 pages
Melani McAlister’s new book comes at a time in which the very notion of “evangelicals” in the United States is the subject of hot dispute.
Any number of news stories have repeated the number 81 percent, the proportion of self-identified white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Some of those stories ask relevant questions: What makes somebody an evangelical? To what extent is it possible to call white and black evangelicals members of the same religious tradition? Often the term “evangelical” is used as shorthand for the religious right — but given our previous qualifiers, how true is that generalization?
McAlister’s frequently fascinating book aims to force readers away from any such neat categorization. The book explores more than a dozen case studies of American evangelicals involving themselves with communities and countries around the globe in the last half of the 20th century, from the massive campaign to fight AIDS in Africa to the struggle against communism in Eastern Europe.
Oxford University Press
Professor of American studies and international affairs Melani McAlister's new book is "The Kingdom of God Has No Borders."
McAlister’s cast of characters includes such prominent figures as Billy Graham, perhaps the most famous evangelical in the world for more than 60 years, and the Romanian priest Richard Wurmbrand, who was imprisoned and tortured multiple times by communist governments. But she also joins much lesser known evangelicals as Dick Robinson, a Milwaukee pastor who has spent much of his life bringing relief supplies and the gospel in equal measure to war-ridden South Sudan, and an interracial group of evangelical college students who spent five weeks teaching English in Cairo in 2006. What emerges is a portrait of an American evangelicalism deeply diverse and complex — and no less difficult to define — by virtue of its global backdrop.
McAlister’s narrative tracks what she calls “two distinct (but linked) postures toward the rest of the world” across three collections of case studies.
The first she calls “enchanted internationalism,” a mystical confidence that the non-Western world offers a more vital and powerful religious experience than our mundane lives in the United States might provide. She points out that this can, at times, lead American believers to romanticize, exoticize and ultimately demean people who live in Africa or Latin America. They are, after all, just people, and speaking of them as though their lack of education or material comforts somehow enhances their spirituality tells Americans more about their ambivalence toward their own wealthy lives than it does about the human beings they are actually dealing with.
However, enchanted internationalism can also lead evangelicals toward McAlister’s second posture — “victim identification.”
Evangelicals, she argues, long for the sense that they are members of a global “body of Christ,” a worldwide community of believers. Gloria White-Hammond, an African-American Boston pediatrician and leader in her local evangelical congregation, found herself identifying so viscerally with the Christians of the Sudan, where a tyrannical regime had revived the ancient practice of slavery, that she joined with Christian Solidarity International, a group that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars purchasing the freedom of captive Christians in Sudan.
McAlister tracks these two themes across more than a dozen of case studies, which she groups into three loose clusters. The first explores the rise of international evangelical networks in the Cold War period, showing how institutions as far-flung as the Israeli tourist bureau gave evangelicals the connections and concepts to begin thinking of themselves as members of a broader international community.
The second cluster of case studies focuses on the body, emphasizing that American evangelicals, who believed in a suffering and redemptive Jesus, could viscerally identify with the physical suffering of others — be they abused black Africans in apartheid South Africa or the tortured victims of communist regimes. McAlister’s last collection emphasizes emotion, exploring how evangelicals sought emotional fulfillment through aid-giving and visits to Africa or the Middle East.
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McAlister’s story is sprawling — sometimes too much. Her clusters can feel only loosely connected to each other, and her themes sometimes vanish beneath narrative. And yet, this accumulation paints a compelling and rich portrait of American evangelicals, one which should help all Americans think in more complicated ways about both American Christians and about the ways in which we involve ourselves in the rest of the world.
Content advisory: "The Kingdom of God Has No Borders" contains discussions of rape and some images of war violence.
The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals
Melani McAlister. Oxford Univ, $29.95 (400) ISBN 978-0-19-021342-8
McAlister (Epic Encounters) traces the 20th-century history of American Protestant evangelical internationalism in this excellent volume. In the first two sections, McAlister focuses her critical explorations on work done by groups and gatherings rather than the experiences of particular individuals. She covers the Lausanne Conference, a 1974 international meeting of evangelicals that set policy and raised many still-debated questions (such as the place of nondenominational Christianity), and Christian Solidarity International, an organization based out of Switzerland dedicated to the practice of “slave redemption” in war zones. The last section highlights contemporary mission projects, including ones in South Sudan and Cairo. McAlister visited these projects and includes her own observations as part of her discussion, including her complimentary take on their health outreach programs. McAlister fails to mention Mormon missionaries, a strange gap considering she discusses Catholic and Muslim missionaries at several points. These small omissions, however, detract little from McAlister’s valuable work on the global reach of evangelicalism. (Aug.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 07/02/2018
Release date: 08/01/2018
Compact Disc - 978-1-68441-556-4
Finding Conservative Christianity’s Place Outside the U.S.: A Review of “No Borders”
James Bratt
Title: The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicalism
Author: Melani McAlister
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publishing Date: August 1, 2018
Pages: 408 pages (Hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0190213428
This book comes with unusual hype. “The Kingdom of God Has No Borders is an enthralling work of stunning originality and ingenuity,” gushes one blurb. “By resituating the history of modern American evangelicalism internationally, Melani McAlister is not just complicating conventional wisdom, she’s smashing it completely. In its place, she offers a startling new interpretation,” namely, that “American evangelicals have been fundamentally shaped by the wider world.”
This praise strikes me as overblown, and it distracts from the book’s real value. No Borders provides us with a wide-ranging, closely researched account of just how American evangelicals have been involved overseas—and to a lesser extent, of how that involvement played out back home. This overseas participation is indeed an important aspect of the American evangelical story, but it is not a paradigm-changer because the book leaves a central question unanswered: Have these not-so-innocents-abroad gone forth in the mode of traveler or tourist? That is, did they gain genuinely new insights there, or did they simply flirt with the idea of the spontaneous and exotic—all the while cramming every experience into pre-set categories?
From the evidence that McAlister presents, the overall answer to these questions is “yes,” and it is to her credit that she leaves the ambiguity in place. Sometimes, American evangelicals have been substantively changed by their experiences; and other times, they have simply garnered a broader range of examples to decorate their preexisting notions. Much of the book’s value comes from the detail with which it bores in on specific key issues—particularly evangelicals’ notions of race, of proper American foreign policy, and for that matter, of the essence of Christianity itself. HERE, THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ENCOUNTERS TURN OUT TO BE SOMETIMES BENIGN, SOMETIMES MALIGN, AND SOMETIMES GENUINELY LIFE-AND MIND-ALTERING.Here, the consequences of their encounters turn out to be sometimes benign, sometimes malign, and sometimes genuinely life-and mind-altering.
Professor McAlister, who teaches American Studies and International Affairs at George Washington University, clusters her fifteen chapters in three co-equal parts. The first glances at some of the “networks” that American evangelicals forged in the post-World War II generation. The second follows “body politics” as a motif through the last third of the 20th century while the third offers “emotions” as an interpretive lens for the most recent era. Although these themes do crop up within their respective sections, they also cut across each other and do not really function as controlling theses of the overall argument. The plan of the book is more plainly chronological.
In the first section, stretching from the 1950s to the Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization in 1974, McAlister investigates evangelicals’ postwar world-missions boom against the backdrop of the civil rights movement back home and Cold War maneuverings abroad (Chapter One). Plenty of heroism to play up here: the “Auca martyrs” in Ecuador; the death—or flight—of missionaries in the Congo (Chapter Two); the triumph of doughty little Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 (Chapter Four). But there is plenty of soul-searching, too, triggered by new converts from Africa being barred from white colleges and churches in the oh-so-evangelical South, or by Congolese Christians asserting their spiritual as well as political independence against white condescension. McAlister shows how these dynamics unfolded across successive Intervarsity triennial conferences at Urbana in the 1960s to launch a distinct form of evangelical social activism (Chapter Three). That initiative, in turn, came into contention with the evangelism-only push of the church-growth movement at the “Battle of Lausanne” in 1974 (Chapter Five). The outcome of that contest, McAlister concludes, was a big-tent compromise that offered room for both under a generic “evangelical” label.
The second section analyzes evangelical self-perception “as both persecuted victim and compassionate rescuer” (106) across the last third of the 20th century up to the achievement of South Sudan’s independence in 2005. The conservative wing played up Communist depredations, especially in Eastern Europe (Chapter Six); the more progressive focused on the evils of South African apartheid (Chapter Seven). But the advantage in this Reagan-Bush era was held by the conservatives; and they used it, first, to pass the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (Chapter Nine) and, second, in popularizing the image of a “10-40 Window” of non-or under-evangelized “people groups” who dwelt in those latitudes around the world (Chapter Eight). For that target, the newly crafted tool of “spiritual warfare” was to be deployed, largely against Islam. All in all, American evangelicals come off in these chapters as genuinely concerned for the suffering abroad but also seizing that suffering for their own purposes. That they were persecuted, too, was the lesson of the sensational novels of Frank Peretti and the politics of the Moral Majority.
EACH GENERATION REINVENTS THE WHEEL OF AUTHENTIC SPIRITUALITY AND A “REAL” AND “RELEVANT” CHURCH. IT ALL SOMEHOW “WORKS” BUT RUNS IN THE SAME OLD LOOP OF HISTORICAL FORGETFULNESS.
In the third section, McAlister treats 21st century developments—from the spiritual tourism of the short-term missions fad (Chapter 11), through the Iraq War (Chapter 12), to the sorry aftermath of South Sudan’s independence (Chapter 13), and American evangelicals’ role in the “sexual politics” of HIV/AIDS controversies in Africa (Chapter 14). To me the low-light of this section comes in the conservatives’ enthusiasm about the proselytizing possibilities opened by the American invasion of Iraq, followed by their abject silence over the practice of torture exposed by the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib. (They eventually blamed it all on the culture of pornography back home.) By contrast, the highlights—indeed, the best parts of the whole book—lie in McAlister’s two stints as a participant-observer. In the first, she accompanies some members of a Wisconsin megachurch to live and learn in the blighted villages of South Sudan (Chapter 13). In the second, she works with an Intervarsity youth group in Cairo (Chapter 15). These are short-term missions of a very different sort and leave poignant images of the better possibilities that evangelicalism has always offered: self-searching, compassion, the felt call for social justice, and genuine openness to the movement of the Spirit. McAlister’s writing, as well as her subjects, come alive here.
So, to return to the laudatory blurb: Have American evangelicals really been “fundamentally shaped by the wider world,” or have they shaped it per their own imagination? Some of the former but more of the latter, I think. This tribe’s worst companions—militarism, American nationalism, clueless Zionism, and reflex neoliberal economics—infuse too much of this story to make it a genuinely new departure. Much of the time, the international scene simply provides a broader platform upon which the traits that have marked this movement for nearly 300 years can stage another act. In addition, this international movement centers everything upon the individual heart, which makes fathoming social structures and intellectual complexity a hard pull. Within this system, contempt for established authority builds into a cult of celebrity and sensationalism. Perfectionist zeal becomes frustrated and turns into apocalyptic fears. There is a perennial combination of mysticism and marketing, of tears and quantification. Each generation reinvents the wheel of authentic spirituality and a “real” and “relevant” church. It all somehow “works” but runs in the same old loop of historical forgetfulness. For these reasons, the excited blurb thus fits all too appropriately: hyperbolic claims of something “brand new” and “the best ever” for a solid product bearing a mixed message.
The final question arises in McAlister’s short, five-page Epilogue. Here she broaches the matter that must loom over the next generation of scholarship by and about evangelicals—the specter of Donald Trump. What does it mean that 81 percent of white American evangelicals voted for the most forthright pagan ever to occupy the White House? What does it mean, in the specific context of this book, that people who supposedly have dealt so much with and learned so much from the rest of the world support a leader defined first and last by xenophobia? What does it mean that people bearing the label of “good news” seem so responsive to a violent rhetoric of hatred and fear? It may mean that the truly revolutionary treatment of American evangelicals remains to be written. When it appears, it will tell the story of how the American brand was redeemed by, or resisted, the more genuine article that is alive around the world. It will be the story of white American evangelicals finally deciding whether they are Christians or Christianists.
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ABOUT JAMES BRATT
James Bratt is professor of history emeritus at Calvin College, specializing in American religious history and especially the connections between religion and politics. The title of his most recent book, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Eerdmans, 2013), is eerily echoed in that of the volume he has edited and completed for the late John Woolverton, which will appear in 2019: “A Christian and a Democrat”: Religion in the Life and Leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.